St. Edgar's Eve

Thief III, Mission #3: “St. Edgar’s Eve”

            Thief III’s missions are smaller, shorter, and simpler than those found in the first two games. They are also divided in two by “load zones”, areas where players enter a patch of ‘blue fog’ that triggers the loading of the other part to the mission. Despite these limitations, Thief III’s missions still have the heavy, effective atmosphere and various narrative caches that make Thief great. As such, they can still be analyzed in light of the rest of my blog. As noted, though, this mission and the next will only get brief analysis, as my Thief III focus is on Mission #9. For now, though, let’s take a brief look at “St. Edgar”, one of the early missions from Thief III.

            The first two Thief games introduced the Hammerites and the Mechanists gradually, subtlety. Thief II’s ‘Docks’ level, which I looked at here was especially effective at gradually bringing the Mechanists onto the scene.

            Thief III is not so subtle or gradual. Also released on the Xbox, and not officially titled “Thief III” but Thief: Deadly Shadows, the game introduces the fiction to players as if they have not played the first two Thief games (though there are plenty of references for Thief veterans). It’s a shame the developers chose to introduce the Hammerites so straightforwardly. Here, the player meets them via a Hammerite cathedral, and not a haunted one. Who they, and how they believe, is pretty well laid out in the foreground.

The experience of this mission makes “Cragscleft’s” indirect, subtle method of introducing the Hammerites to the players seem all the more impressive. Thus, this mission might be used as a case study of why Thief I’s “Cragscleft” has a more effective method of character-introduction than the more simple, shallow “St. Edgar’s Eve”.

          

            That being noted, “St. Edgar” still has a well-stitched, heavy atmosphere. I love all the chanting and hammer noises in the ambiance; it’s just as haunting as the audio in the first two Thief games. The mission also has an interesting gameplay piece in it. To get the Chalice of St. Edgar, the player needs to first get the Priest’s Holy Symbol. To get the priest out of his room to make getting this Holy Symbol more practical, the player rings the church bell. This mission, as Garrett said in the briefing, takes place on a holy night—well, just look at the mission title—and the priest is bestowing blessings. Any Hammerite wanting to be blessed calls him with the church bell. This is, then, another example of Thief seamlessly combines a story bit with a gameplay piece.

            The player could also just barge into the priest’s room, drop a couple flash bombs, and knock out or kill him and the guard in the room. But this would alert other guards; killing is precluded on Expert; and that’s not very thiefy. Neither is ringing a church bell, though. It’s all up to player choice.

            Though many story elements are laid out, rather than gradually introduced, there are some subtle introduction of story elements effectively done in one area of Thief III. The main story arc of Thief III involves a Hammerite referred to as Inspector Drept, an old hag of urban legend, and an ancient evil. The beginnings of this story arc appear in a section of the Hammerite Factory in St. Edgar’s in Inspector Drept’s office. Here, through a readable, Inspector Drept and his lifelong obsession with “the Gray Lady” is introduced. This main component of Thief III’s story won’t really come to a head until late in the game, but is here hinted at. I include this in the video below. (Note that this story arc is the setup of “the Cradle”, which I will analyze in a later entry.)

            Overall, the Church of St. Edgar is a simple structure, and exploring all its nooks and crannies, and completing the mission, should not take the Thief veteran, or even the standard gamer, much time or effort. This makes one wistful for the intricacies of Thief I’s “Cragscleft”.

            The lesson to take from “St. Edgar” is that, though Thief III is just as effective at creating atmosphere, it lacks, for the most part, the nuance of how Thief I and II introduced their character groups. “Cragscleft” stands in contrast to “St. Edgar” in introducting the Hammerites. Thus this post of mine serves as both a critique of Thief III and as further praise of Thief I—that, even within Thief’s design, there are right and wrong ways of doing things, and “St. Edgar” gets wrong what “Cragscleft” did so well.